Sunday, December 18, 2011

The namesake for this website and many of my creative endeavors has passed on. Vaclav Havel had died. I made the name Vaclav's Hovel as a pun on his years ago to first hang over a sheep shed, and then used it as a company name on order forms as a joke. Since then it has come to mean what he symbolized for the world: if a playwright can overthrow communism in his country, why can't a girl sail around the world, an actor be president of the United States?

It's not just the seeming impossibility of the ideas that appeals to me. It's the idea that people are not limited to what they are labeled to be. It's the idea that what one does in one discipline may very well inform and make them better in another.

Havel was also friends with and a great admirer of Frank Zappa. Havel asked Zappa to be a cultural ambassador to the new Czech republic, but the Bush administration refused. I admire both men, and the name Vaclav's Hovel is a tribute to both. Zappa died in 1994.

Goodbye, Mr. Havel, and thank you for your work in freeing the Czech people.